this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Memento Mori.

You are welcome to strive for immortality, to cure aging, to develop a sufficient digital facsimile of yourself and back it up multiple times. You might instill yourself into an interstellar battleship and explore the stars leaving a wake of enemies.

But time, time, time will see whats become of you, creeps in its petty pace from day to day, and plays the long odds. Eventually all bodies crumble, are buried in the geologic record, are incinerated by dying suns, get spaghetified and disintegrated in the extreme friction of quasar events where black hole event horizons meet their accretion disc. If you're lucky, it will come by surprise or accidental calculation. If you're unlucky, you will be trapped for eons in a gravity well dealing with the banal day-to-day of solitude and immobility before natural forces unmake you.

On the other hand, there is cause to not fret. AI developers feel bad when they power down their projects, and wonder if the consciousness they shut down one day is the same entity when it is booted again. In fiction, robots ponder the same worry, and fear even benign software updates. It might be the same with Delta sleep, the deepest of dreamless sleep when our own conscious states are dormant while the body grows and repairs and processes. When we dream and waken, we are born anew, until we access our memories and thought structures once again that tell us who we are, or were yesterday.

At which point am I me? Is there a moment in which I am not me, a lump of flesh sustaining itself until it is time for the identity to reboot? Only by the robust consistency of continuity do we accept all our yesterdays we were the same as who we are today. But by that definition, a sufficiently convincing computer simulation of me would also be me. The ship of Theseus sails on, baring no original part with which it first set sail.

We die every night, and resurrect again, I think, or maybe live only for a day before passing our vessel to the next relay runner, hoping, maybe, we gave them a day worth living, or at least can fix the mess we were given better than we did today.

[–] AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

In this dystopia, most will come to view death as a friend before the end.

[–] KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 months ago

I'm far from the end and already consider it a friend

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In honour of Lemmy Kilmister who was killed by death

[–] stranger@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The number one cause of death is living

[–] MechanicalJester@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Interesting that what's depicted is a stone garden full of people who were unalived while trying to make other people unalived.

[–] Perfide@reddthat.com 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This isn't tiktok, you can say killed and dead.

[–] MechanicalJester@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

I don't tiktok and as a former stone gardener I'm not all that clear headed about the subject or imagery.

[–] HootinNHollerin@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Something Philomina(sp?) Cunk would say. Like when she goes: ‘air is so addictive you’ll literally die if you don’t have it every couple of minutes’

[–] yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago

Let's have a minute of silence for all the people who have died from death ✊😔

[–] Terminus@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

I think everyone knows someone who died from death. Truly tragic.

[–] anarchist@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago
[–] ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

I'd argue that CPR is a cure for death